MEET LINE LEVEL 2.0
While you scroll aimlessly on overpriced airplane Wi-Fi, or battle major FOMO if, like me (Joanna), you’re not off to Los Angeles this year for AWP, here’s a bit of news that might shake things up….
Since its launch in 2023, LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons From Poets of Color, has been highlighting poets of all backgrounds, finding writers whose recent or forthcoming work showed powerful techniques that could be explored both by the poets and then by the editor and writer Joanna Acevedo, a longtime member of the Frontier Poetry team. The column hoped to showcase talent from all over the world, as well as be a new kind of educational resource that felt DIY, collaborative, and poet-forward. We’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished, but all good things must end.
And then they come back even better. LINE LEVEL is getting a makeover!
Meet LINE LEVEL 2.0! With the help of guest editors Shahryar Eskandari Zanjani and Abdulrazaq Salihu (who is a former contributor himself), the new column will be focusing not only on poets of color writing in English, but seeking to highlight poets for whom English is a foreign language. Many poets write in English as a non-native language, but the subject remains relatively unknown or even ignored in the poetry world, and for us, this stops now. We want to read these poems, hear these voices, and learn the stories of all kinds of poets, not just the ones we’ve grown to expect.
We asked LINE LEVEL #16 contributor Thalia Geiger a few questions about her poetry practice—she was our final poet in the original version of the column.
Frontier Poetry: Do you speak or write in any other language?
Thalia Geiger: No, I don’t. Learning a few, though!
FP: Do you think you could write poetry in any of the languages you’re studying?
TG: I could probably give some basic haiku-style poems a try. I’ve always wondered if my work could be more poignant in another language.
FP: Why do you think that? What benefit would another language bring you?
TG: I know some people find a freeing sort of comfort in expressing themselves in another language. Maybe it would provide some cover for me to be even more authentic, if that’s possible. Without all the complications of English, maybe another language could reveal a new truth about myself that I don’t see.
Thalia’s LINE LEVEL post was on Monday, and she gave us amazing insight about poetry, craft, and language. In April, we’ll share more about the new guest editors, support staff, contributing poets and goals with the new focus of the project. Stay tuned for more new and improved LINE LEVEL 2.0!
